Typewolf offers online type inspiration

New site designed to recommend web fonts, including open-source examples

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Typewolf aims to assist web designers and developers with typography by providing daily inspiration and pointers.

Typography is an increasingly important part of the web, but it’s also an aspect of design in which many web designers have little training. Not that long ago, you merely had to choose between a handful of web-safe fonts. Now, many thousands of web fonts are available from the likes of Typekit and SkyFonts.

Speaking to .net, Typewolf founder and interactive art director Jeremiah Shoaf said, whenever he begins designing a site, the first decision he makes is what fonts to use: “I think typography is the foundation of design and it all begins with font selection. I couldn’t find any good resources out there for choosing web fonts, so I decided to create one myself.”

Regarding Typewolf’s design, Shoaf explained the large, non-scaled-down screengrabs “clearly show off the fonts used in each design”. The layout was kept clean to ensure the focus remained on featured sites and typography.

“I also work on a lot of design projects where using an open-source web font is a requirement, and so I thought it would be nice to feature a section showing off the best open-source web fonts,” he said, on another of the site’s main features.

As for choosing fonts for new projects, Shoaf offered some recommendations beyond getting inspired on Typewolf: “I think it’s important to choose a font family that comes in multiple weights. Having a bold variation is a must, but having light, book, semi-bold and ultra-bold variations is super-helpful in creating a typographic hierarchy. There are even free, open-source web fonts that come with a full set of weights. Source Sans Pro, for example, contains six different weights.”